It’s been good to see some solidarity among the White House press corps. After President Trump banned Politico, CNN and MS Now from the White House, they all filed suit. Then, five major TV networks halted their pooled coverage of the White House and issued a unified statement. The New York Times and Washington Post said they would not publish photos taken by the pool on Monday. That’s good, however, they should continue their boycott and organize other newsrooms to join them.
It was a whole year ago that Trump banned our members at the Associated Press after the wire service refused to change their style on the Gulf of Mexico. A federal judge ruled in the AP’s favor, however, the case is tied up in appeals.
Over the weekend our members at Politico released a statement saying that our member Cheyenne Haslett was barred from the White House “simply for doing her job.”
“Press access cannot be weaponized against journalists for their reporting,” they said. “An attack on one outlet’s ability to cover the White House is an attack on a free press for all of us. We stand with our members and every journalist targeted for doing their job.”
During his first term, Trump revoked the press pass of CNN’s Jim Acosta, who successfully won it back in court. He spoke to New York Magazine and said Trump is trying to “distract the public from the serious political trouble he’s in” and “soften up the press to what may be a challenge to the election results.”
Acosta, in the story’s kicker, questions the response to Trump’s actions. “Strongly worded statements: Where have they gotten us in this second administration, not just the news media but from any institution in American society?”
The only solution is to stand together, push newsroom management to defend our colleagues, defend our work and hold other news organizations to account by calling on them to stand with us.
We won a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration for their attempts to restrict international journalists working in the United States. It’s our third injunction we’ve won against Trump in this term. What a sad thing to have to write.
I gave you the scene from inside a Boston courtroom in the last newsletter and thought the judge would rule in our favor. And U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor did.
He wrote that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security failed to provide any reasonable explanation for why it needed to cut the time international journalists are permitted to work in the country to a maximum of 240 days. Currently, journalists admitted on this type of visa can stay for multiple years.
We joined this lawsuit alongside other unions and university groups and filed it in August. The rules also impacted international scholars coming to the U.S. to study.
The Guild’s membership includes dozens of journalists in the United States working on I visas at several outlets including Le Monde, EFE, the CBC, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
What happens next? The rule has been postponed indefinitely. The longstanding policy remains in effect. The U.S. government may appeal the preliminary injunction. Our union and our coalition will keep fighting efforts to reduce the time that international journalists can work in the U.S.
McClatchy laid off more than 90 unionized workers across 17 publications, in a devastating blow to communities across the United States who depend on local journalists to seek truth and report it. That’s about 30% of the journalists we represent in the hedge fund-owned news chain. (Chatham Asset Management also owns Post Media in Canada.)
Our union leaders laid out the losses in terms of what our communities will lose. McClatchy axed many accountability journalists.
In Washington, no one will cover city hall in the state’s third-largest city. McClatchy laid off the only two investigative reporters in Charlotte, N.C. The Centre Daily Times in Pennsylvania, which just unionized with us this year, lost more than half of their news reporters.
In Miami, the Herald is left without a city hall reporter at the paper’s namesake and the company cut the entire writing staff of El Nuevo Herald, the Herald’s Spanish-language sister newspaper.
Support McClatchy journalists here.
Last week, our members protested outside The New York Times’ lavish 175th anniversary gala, and they even had a message truck! “We’re here to remind the execs throwing this big bash that we are a crucial part of the company’s success and they should commit today to agreeing to a fair contract,” Times Guild unit chair Jim Luttrell told TheWrap.
A police officer contracted by the Times threatened to arrest Guild members for “trespassing” the public sidewalk in front of the venue. “It is shameful that The Times’s leadership would instruct anyone to threaten to arrest Times journalists for exercising their First Amendment rights,” workers wrote in a letter to management.
Times Guild members have been fighting for a new contract since January. So far management has refused, among other things, to guarantee human-in-the-loop guardrails on AI and to fully fund health care, which would leave workers with exponentially higher out-of-pocket costs.
Workers at the Cooperative Development Institute won voluntary recognition, after organizing with the Providence Newspaper Guild to demand greater participation in workplace decisions, transparency, equitable working conditions and more. The Institute supports cooperatively-owned businesses in the Northeast U.S.
“Every day, we help communities build structures that give people a meaningful voice in the decisions that affect them,” said Addy Schuetz, a member of the newly formed CDI Workers United. “We believe workers deserve that same opportunity. Forming CDI Workers United gives us a way to bring those values more fully into our own workplace and to work together toward a stronger, more sustainable CDI.”
Oxford University Press violated its contract with Guild members, an impartial arbitrator ruled. Back in 2024, Oxford University Press laid off 13 U.S.-based workers, represented by the News Media Guild, and replaced them with UK-based employees.
The issue? The collective bargaining agreement secured by our members prohibits offshoring.
“The ruling is historic,” said Tony Winton, the News Media Guild’s executive director, “because it vindicates language in many NewsGuild contracts negotiated to limit offshoring and use of non-bargaining unit personnel.”
Unfortunately, Oxford University Press hasn’t ended their offshoring practices. Earlier this month, workers in the UK were on strike because management is laying off nearly 50 people on the finance team and replacing them with employees in India. You can sign the petition to call on the company, which announced $50 million in profits last year, to reverse their decision.
The Toledo Blade may be closing soon after the owners announced they would shut down the historic newspaper if a new buyer doesn’t come forward by the end of the year. The Blade is nearly 200 years old and owned by Block Communications Inc., the same company that broke federal law in Pittsburgh, instigated a 3+ year strike and lost all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Workers got the news in an email the day after Labor Day. Prior to that, the company had asked our members to vote for a contract proposal that would have cut their severance in half and greenlit giving away their work to AI. Workers voted it down.
“It’s disappointing that Block Communications would rather shutter the paper than work toward an equitable contract,” Lillian King said in a statement. King is a features writer and the Guild’s bargaining chair.
“Signing that contract would have meant signing away our self-respect, and with it, Toledo’s mandate for ethical journalism. After nearly 200 years of operating one of the nation’s great newspapers, Toledo deserves better,” King said.
Former Blade Journalist Liz Skalka spoke to several of her former colleagues for a story published Tuesday in the Columbia Journalism Review. Skalka goes into the paper’s recent history and it’s worth a read.
“This ultimately is a business decision that’s a consequence of the management of the company, not necessarily the individual reporters that are going to be stuck with the consequences,” said Alex Bracken, a general assignment reporter who started at the paper last year.
We’ll continue to support our members in Toledo as they navigate this ugly moment created by the Block family.
Our steward training continues on Thursday, October 1 with a workshop on how to be a workplace organizer. It’ll start at 7:30 p.m. ET and you’ll learn how to maintain effective union structures and assess power in your workplace. Register here.
In solidarity,
Jon Schleuss
President
The NewsGuild-CWA